


sailed on a river of crystal light

by togethertheyfightcrime



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Human, Angst with a Happy Ending, Family, Fluff and Angst, Gen, Guy Fawkes Night, Hurt/Comfort, Post-World War II, Tea, The Leaf, The TARDIS could do with a repaint, The Weeping Angels - Freeform, set vaguely in the seventies, the scarf makes a cameo
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-01
Updated: 2014-11-01
Packaged: 2018-02-23 13:38:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,442
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2549501
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/togethertheyfightcrime/pseuds/togethertheyfightcrime
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>Not everything ends. Not love. Not ever.</i>
</p><p> </p><p>Or, young Clara Oswald and the mad old man next door, with angels in his garden and raggedy bow ties on his neck, who talks to his dead wife. Human AU.</p>
            </blockquote>





	sailed on a river of crystal light

**Author's Note:**

> No serious warnings, but if you're concerned, potential emotional triggers are listed at the end. The title is from _Wynken, Blynken, and Nod_.

Mummy said he was a terribly sad old man, so they ought to be kind to him. 

Clara thought he was mad. It was her way, then, to wrap everyone and everything into the smallest words, tuck them away in her mind and move on. To keep the world in her head.

 

Daddy never seemed to mind old Mr Smith, but Daddy never seemed to mind much of anything, except when Arsenal lost on the telly. Then he cursed at the footballers and his face went all red and squidgy. Clara thought that was funny.

 

* * *

 

Mr Smith smelled musty and dusty, like Clara’s gran’s old scarves that were wrinkling up in a box in the attic. He always wore the same big tweed coat and a raggedy bow tie and his fringe fell over a nose that was long and knobby, and he never brushed his hair. It stood up in funny places and slumped in others, all crackly and white, with thin spears of grey sagging down over his wrinkled, papery skin.

 

When Mr Smith was excited about something he would frisk around like a little boy and babble in his hoarse, crackly voice. And then he’d stop suddenly and sag down and stare at nothing and look very upset. That always happened whenever Clara went over to visit, usually when Mummy made her take over a plate of biscuits because Mr Smith sometimes forgot to eat. She’d kick her legs back and forth on the big stuffy velvet chair Mr Smith had her sit in and hum and call his name but it was like his brain went away, and it was _boring_.

 

And his house was littered with scraps of paper that had half-finished drawings of dead people on them. And there were scary statues in his garden that seemed to move in the high grass. And he took apart his hoovers and wireless and moved all the bits around inside them. And he was always painting his shed bluer and bluer. And his books spilled out of the shelves and stacked up in the loo and the staircase and the kitchen and once Clara even found _A History of the Great War_ underneath a jam jar.

 

And he talked to his dead wife. 

 

* * *

 

‘He had a little granddaughter like you,’ Mummy said from the sink. Foamy swaths of bubbles wreathed down her wrists, sluiced over her hands. She held Clara’s tea mug beneath the tap. ‘A long time ago. I think you remind him of her.’

 

‘Is she dead?’ Clara said, and did not look up from her colouring pages swathed across the kitchen linoleum. 

 

‘Yes, poppet, she’s dead.’

 

‘In that war?’

 

Mummy pressed a breath between her lips, a half-sad little half-sigh, and pushed the sponge along the contours of the mug without spirit. ‘In that war.’

 

‘Why do they all hafta be dead, Mummy?’ Clara said with carefully moderated exasperation – too much and her mother would have scolded her, too little and Clara could not have conveyed the small nips of frustration at the realisation that once again, she, Clara, had no way out of being Mr Smith’s especial favourite. No way out of being the new face for a ghost. 

 

Clara’s mother _tsk_ ed and hummed and stared out at nothing the way grown-ups always did when they felt bad for someone. ‘I don’t know, love. I truly don’t know.’

 

The tap hummed and slurped away and Clara’s mother did not move, even when Clara finally looked up from the crumpled pages and fisted crayons and stared at her mother’s even silhouette and the soap suds that were now bleeding into the tucked-up sleeves of her jumper.

 

‘Mummy?’

 

‘I’m fine, love.’

 

But she looked quite sad. Outside, the clouds shifted, and the sunbeams were drowned by thoughts of rain.

 

* * *

 

‘Blimey, that time of year already, Clara love? I remember Bonfire Night back when I was your age,’ Mr Smith said when Clara came around to his garden to ask for a penny for the Guy. ‘My mate and I pinched some of my mum’s sheets from the washing line and stuffed our Guy with them, oh, she went into a _fury_ when she found out–’

 

Clara stood and wriggled her toes, watching him natter. He wore the same tweed coat he always did, and it smelled a bit off. He was painting the shed again: the brush sat limply in the grass, bleeding deep blue down into the earth, and the fresh strokes of colour on the ancient, creaking wood of the shed glistened in the weary afternoon sun. There was blue paint caught in spare tufting tips of Mr Smith’s white hair, and it stood starkly against the pale strands.

 

‘My River,’ Mr Smith said, and his face went all squidgy and soft like it always did when he talked about his dead wife, ‘she loves Bonfire Night. Always has a penny ready to give out to the little tykes come November–’

 

Clara felt itchy and bored and she just wanted a coin. She didn’t even like Bonfire Night that much; watching people laugh and talk while they burned up a stuffed man made Clara feel a bit sick. Specially since Guy Fawkes had been a real person, even a bad one. But Daddy always waved that off. ‘Tradition, Clara; go on and see Mr Smith now,’ he’d said. 

 

Behind Mr Smith, one of the scary angels was crying, and it seemed to sway in the shade of a skeleton tree. A ladybird crawled over and behind its stone fingers. Clara wondered what statue tears would look like. She was glad she couldn’t see its eyes.

 

Mr Smith was still talking about old dead River and her scary burnt Guys and now Clara felt shuddery and stuck in her own skin. ‘I don’t _care_ ,’ she blurted suddenly, and Mr Smith stopped talking so quickly and looked at her with such big sad eyes that she began to feel ill and guilty in her stomach. But she kept on: ‘I don’t care about River, I just want a stupid penny to make the stupid Guy and you’ve got paint in your hair.’

 

But Mr Smith’s brain had already gone faraway to the sad place and Clara felt so guilty with his sad dark eyes staring at her that she started to cry without meaning to, but old Mr Smith didn’t even notice and the paint smell was thick and made Clara feel queasy and she ran out of the garden and went home with no penny in her pocket at all.

 

* * *

 

‘You shouldn’t be mean to him, Clara,’ Mummy said later, when it was time to tuck Clara in. Daddy was out in the field with the other people laughing and burning a Guy who looked like a real man behind the crackling sheen of flames. 

 

Clara still felt ill. She’d peeked out the window later into Mr Smith’s garden, and though the old man had gone in, he hadn’t finished painting. The new, sharp blue stood out awkwardly against the softer robin’s-egg around it.

 

‘You shouldn’t be mean to him, Clara,’ Mummy had said, pulling the duvet up against Clara’s chin and smoothing back a twist of Clara’s knotty hair. ‘He’s a sad old man.’

 

Clara poked out her lips and knit her arms together under the thick padding of the duvet. Merry the teddy sat jauntily by Clara’s ear. ‘He’s _mad_ , Mummy. He’s got scary angels and he always paints the shed and he talks to River.’

 

‘You talk to your teddies,’ Clara’s mum said, which wasn’t the same at all, even though it was true. And it was the least important problem out of all of them.

 

‘He smells funny.’

 

‘Would you wash if I didn’t make you?’

 

Clara sagged back against the pillow and thought very seriously. ‘Maybe. Prolly if we were going to see aunty Edith.” Aunty Edith kept bric-a-brac on all her shelves and fluttered like a little nervous bird whenever Clara got within breathing distance of the tiny ceramic figures. Her whole flat was so clean that it made Clara uncomfortable.

 

Clara’s mum hesitated, nibbling a bit at her lower lip the way Clara did when she was worried. The noises from the bonfires down the street were dying down, and everything was growing quiet as the moonlight that crept in through Clara’s curtains.

 

‘If you lost someone you loved,’ Mummy finally said, ‘wouldn’t you miss them?’

 

Clara shrugged. 

 

‘Wouldn’t you want to pretend they were still there, even just a little? So you didn’t feel as sad?’

 

‘But River’s _not_ there,’ protested Clara, and she didn’t understand, wouldn’t understand for many years.

 

Mummy sighed. She leaned forward and pressed a kiss to Clara’s brow, and her hair slid down and tickled Clara’s cheek. She smelled like cinnamon.

 

‘He’s old, dear. He’s very old and very sad and his whole family died very long ago, so you must be very good to him.’

 

Off went the lamp. Clara pursed her lips in the darkness and thought.

 

* * *

 

The next morning, Clara took her tea mug and she crept through the garden door to Mr Smith’s house. He was already out, standing by the pond under the big old tree, and he had a big metal bin he was dropping papers into and he was wearing a long colourful scarf. 

 

Suddenly Clara felt very cold and very small and she wanted to hide behind her tea mug. But she made her feet stay in the high grasses of the garden and she clutched the warmth of her tea and said quietly, ‘Hullo.’

 

Mr Smith turned around with a paper still in his hand and beamed at her like sunrise. The scarf picked up bits of wind and danced. ‘Clara love! You’ve come at the perfect time – we’re having our own Bonfire Night. Only it’s more of a Bonfire Morning, wouldn’t you say?’

 

He wasn’t cross, Clara thought, and felt even smaller. Then: perhaps he doesn’t even remember, she wondered, while she padded through the grasses toward the bin. Mr Smith tipped it towards her a little, so she could see inside. It was half full of papers and papers and papers, all typewritten neatly with numbers in the corners and at the bottom most of them said _the end_.

 

‘They’re last pages,’ Clara whispered. ‘Where’s their books?’

 

Back sat the bin and Mr Smith worried the edges of his scarf. ‘I always take out the last page. From every book. But sometimes the pages start taking up quite a lot of space, and it’s a good cold morning for a fire, don’t you think?’

 

‘But–’ She didn’t understand. Leaves from the big tree stirred and rattled in the breeze, and a few of them jumped away from the branches and fluttered down around the bin. And Clara thought of the leaf that was meant to be _her_ story, and the book that it was safe inside, and she didn’t want to take away its last page, either. ‘But that’s not how a story works. It has to have an end.’

 

‘Says who?’ smiled Mr Smith, but he didn’t look happy at all. Clara’s eyes flicked down at the yellowed paper he was holding, pinched gently between two gnarled fingers, and the neat black print in its centre: _hello old friend and here we–_

 

‘Now the stories never end,’ Mr Smith told her. ‘Now they never have to.’ And when he smiled again, smiled down at Clara with the steam curling up from her big mug and warming her nose, Clara thought maybe he was saying her forgave her for being cross. 

 

But when Mr Smith lit a match and dropped it into the bin of last pages, Clara turned around and pressed her face into his tweed coat and didn’t look.

 

* * *

 

Then Mummy got ill. Clara took their book with her leaf and put it right on her bedside table, by her lamp and her pillow and her head when it was dreaming, and sometimes when she woke at night and saw the book resting there, she had to open it again and see the last page was safe before she could sleep.

 

* * *

 

When Mummy got ill, Clara started going to old Mr Smith’s house after school. He would natter and prattle and bounce around, telling her about constellations and mad dead scientists and faery folk and the funny place he’d found one of his favourite books at this week. He’d always switch on the kettle for their tea but forget he had done. After a while Clara started making the tea herself. Then when he ran out of leaves and forgot to get new ones, they would go down to the shops together, and always come back with odd bits to make sandwiches with (“Marmite and cheese, Clara love, it’s quite good”) and strange teas from India that tickled in Clara’s nose (“Don’t sneeze on the Shakespeare, that’s a dear”) and far too many biscuits. Sometimes they forgot to get tea at all and had to go back. 

 

After months of this Clara realised that she never thought about Mummy at Mr Smith’s house. Not in the sad way Daddy did, staring at the old shopping lists in her curly handwriting or her spare jumpers in the wash. It made Clara cross to see Daddy like that, because Mummy wasn’t _gone_ , she was just in hospital for a while and soon it’d all be fine, Mummy said so. It was already Clara’s job to be Mr Smith’s favourite, she wasn’t sure if she could manage being happy for Mummy and good for Daddy _and_ get good marks in school all at once.

 

A few weeks after that Clara found herself in the garden, painting the shed bluer with old Mr Smith. He was telling her a story from round the other end of the shed.

 

‘We were on holiday in Scotland, River and I were, to see the cliffs and hear the bagpipes. Or was it Ireland? Everyone wore tartan skirts, I can remember that much.’

 

‘That’s Scotland,’ Clara said, and she wiped her sky-stained palms on her school jumper and left streaks of colour there. The shed was gleaming cobalt. She’d heard this story before.

 

‘Scotland, yes, that’s my clever girl,’ Mr Smith said, and his voice was so fond it shook. She could hear the steady scratching sweep of his paintbrush, up-and-down, back-and-forth. ‘We sat down right on the edge of the cliffs, with the whole world falling away beneath our feet – which you mustn’t ever do, Clara love, it was quite silly of us –’

 

‘I know, Mr Smith, I won’t.’

 

‘And we sat for hours, we watched the sea skipping over the sand, and we listened to the wind. D’you ever do that? Just sit in the quiet and wait for the wind to start singing? It’s like, well, it’s like being in love. And I am in love, Clara. I love her madly.’

 

_Oh dear_ , Clara thought, because now Mr Smith was getting quiet, and that meant his brain was about to go off to the sad place again. She scurried round the corner of the shed and tugged on his tweed sleeve, once, twice. Blue from her palms coated the musty edges circling his gnarled palms.

 

‘I’m hungry. Have we still got Jammie Dodgers?’

 

He blinked a few times, lashes stuttering over the dark pools of his eyes, and then he was back. He looked down at Clara. Smiled.

 

‘Put the kettle on, Clara love.’

 

* * *

 

That night Daddy came home late, very late, when Clara had already tucked herself in with Geoffrey the teddy. She ought to have been asleep, it was nearly ten, but Mr Smith had loaned her a copy of _Frankenstein_ and it was deliciously scary. And maybe just a bit _frightening_ , because Clara jumped and gasped when she heard Daddy bang into something downstairs. 

 

She thought maybe he’d just dropped his rucksack, but then she heard a strangled half-sob, half-yell, and there was another bang, and it sounded like Daddy was hitting the wall.

 

Something dark and awful crept into Clara’s stomach and made her feel ill, and small, and scared.

 

* * *

 

Mummy had been dead for hours, but to Clara, she died at eight past ten at night, when Daddy told her with his haggard eyes and his voice paper-thin and shaking. So Clara ran. 

 

She ran and ran and she did not look up or breathe or stop until there was water brushing her bare tiny toes, and she was at the old man’s pond.

 

‘Too many goodbyes,’ Mr Smith had told her once, on a bad day after school when his eyes sunk, shadowed, into the crevasses of his pale skin. Mummy had been ill and Daddy had been with her and Mr Smith was staring at Clara but only seeing the past. ‘There were too many goodbyes. I couldn’t say it again. I couldn’t.’

 

She hadn’t understood then. She wouldn’t understand for a long while.

 

Mr Smith found her there, sitting with her legs dangling over the edge of the pond, staring out at nothing, like the world was falling away beneath her feet. His limbs were old and aching, and there was hurt bone-deep in them from more than what time had wrought, but he sat down beside the little girl and stayed there until morning. The pond whispered at their knees.

 

They listened to the wind singing.

 

* * *

 

They made Clara look pretty for Mummy’s funeral, Nana and the aunts did. They put her in a dress (she hated dresses) and pretended she couldn’t see them whispering and sniffling (she could) and did up her hair with plaits and bows, like she was off to a do. 

 

Clara kept looking around for Mummy to come take the plait out, kept reaching her hand back for Mummy to take it and squeeze it and kiss Clara’s head. But her hands kept touching nothing at all and the cold in the air was empty that morning, so Clara took their travel book with her travel leaf inside and she clutched it so close to her chest it ruined the pretty bows on her dress. 

 

They were shinier and prettier than Mr Smith’s bow ties, the bows were, and Clara hated them. Clara hated everything. Except she couldn’t quite feel anything at all.

 

Then in the church they were singing and Clara thought she heard Mummy’s voice, long and sweet behind the colours of the voices filling up tot he ceiling, but she couldn’t quite find it. And Daddy’s hands kept shaking when he smoothed Clara’s hair, and at the church and at the wake and then when they walked to the empty place in the graveyard Clara couldn’t see Mr Smith. She didn’t think he’d come for her at all. 

 

‘Clara,’ Daddy was telling her, but his voice was bent and ruined with all the crying he didn’t want to do, ‘Clara, say goodbye.’

 

_Too many goodbyes. I couldn't say it again._

 

There was a box and it was a gentle kissing pink with bits of blue, and it was filling the empty place in the graveyard. Everything went very quiet, like the wind had held its breath.

 

Clara knelt in the grass and let mud ruin the knees of her pretty skirt. She opened the book that Mummy gave her and Daddy sucked in a breath when he saw the leaf. Give it to him, Clara thought, it’s what he saw before he first saw Mummy – but they’d given the leaf to _her_ , and Clara couldn’t give that up. Not ever. 

 

But there was this, even if Mr Smith hadn’t come, had stayed alone in his house with his angels and his stories: Clara tipped her book and let the pages shush until she reached _the end_ , and in one smooth tug she pulled it out and folded it small and dropped it so it swirled like a leaf from a tree down to rest on Mummy’s box.

 

‘Oh, _Clara_ ,’ someone was saying, but there was too much wind in Clara’s ears to hear who, ‘my Clara.’ Hands moved her back and dirt tumbled onto Mummy and the book closed. She looked at Daddy and saw him covering his face so he couldn’t see anyone while he cried. 

 

Then Clara looked up, and there was Mr Smith’s hand on her shoulder, and Mr Smith’s other hand in her hair, and when Clara started shaking he took off his old tweed coat and wrapped it warm around her.

 

* * *

 

One day, not so long after, Clara stood outside in arcing sunbeams and watched rivulets of blue crease the shed. The paintbrush in her hand was sodden and still. Dribbling blue midnight droplets fell to the earth below.

 

Old Mr Smith was talking, talking. To River, or to no one, Clara could never be sure.

 

He’d not said a word to her in greeting when she came over that afternoon, unable to bear the heavy silence of her own house, her own father. He’d dropped a bucket and a brush into her empty hands, gotten paint in her hair when he patted her head, and bustled to the garden in one of his beaming, youthful airs. The tweed coat he wore was slashed and streaked by blue. Like tartan. 

 

Carefree and childlike.

 

Clara didn’t know why she had to go and spoil everything. Sometimes it was quite fun, this way to forget – a ridiculous thing, adding more blue to the bluest shed in the whole country. She’d snuck around the corner on light and quiet feet to splash a streak of blue paint onto his tweed back, and he’d hobbled around behind her to do the same, and they’d both laughed. He still had a child’s laugh. Clara thought she had forgotten how.

 

And then he’d hefted the brush, dabbed it towards her like a professor with a pointer, said, ‘We oughtn’t dally. River says she could do with a repaint, you know.’

 

Around the shed, layering colours, he went; Clara did not move. Because Mummy was dead, just like River, and still this was where they were, painting blue over blue over blue. Christmas was coming – Clara could taste the snow in the air, and her breath made diamond frost on windows, and Mummy was dead, and maybe Clara was angry and maybe Clara was numb but Clara knew she wasn’t breathing and her mother wasn’t either, and Mr Smith kept talking to his dead wife like Clara wanted to talk to her mummy and never would again, never ever, and neither would he because River was dead and Mummy was dead and they were _gone_ and they weren’t coming back. And still Mr Smith talked and laughed like he had his River, like he had kept her somehow, and he said he loved her madly and he’d loved her into madness and he certainly loved her more than he ever could Clara, and Mummy was dead, and the wind was prickling coldly on the back of her neck and the blue was cutting down her wrist like soapsuds on her mother’s hands and Mummy was _dead_ –

 

Mr Smith was there, then. Clara hadn’t seen him tip his head around the shed, hadn’t seen the maze of wrinkles on his face collapse with worry and crumble into sadness. Stumbling forward, he reached with one gnarled hand for Clara’s shoulder – and she struck it away and hated herself for it, knelt down and clutched the paintbrush and did not cry, did not scream, only shook.

 

* * *

 

‘She was painting the shed the day she died,’ old Mr Smith said, and everything seemed to stop.

 

_Was_ , he’d said. _Died_ , he’d said. Clara felt her whole body go still. 

 

‘Used to be an awful shade of grey,’ he said, gesturing with a weary arm and sopping paintbrush toward the creaking mess of colour that stood sentinel for the garden.’“River always hated it. I was gone, you know, out and travelling. I was always out. And she went and carried over a bucket of blue paint and started all on her lonesome to–’

 

Mr Smith stopped talking and Clara thought his brain was away, again, and wished she’d known how the story ended. She looked up.

 

Mr Smith was crying. Quiet tears, lost in the map of wrinkles that sat like a mask over his face, but there they were. Clara didn’t think. She went over and sat by him and leaned her little head on his shoulder. 

 

‘She knew she wasn’t to work so long, not with her heart. Stubborn old girl,’ Mr Smith said, and his voice trembled so Clara could hardly hear. ‘I came home to a shed half-painted. Well. I’m still trying to finish the job.’

 

Clara didn’t understand. Her heart was aching as it pressed against her ribs, like it couldn’t take the pull of gravity anymore and wanted to fly away. There was a cold kiss on her brow and she wondered, had the snow come?

 

‘She’s gone,’ Clara said. ‘She’s gone, you know she is. She’s gone like Mummy.’ All her questions were there, all the things she was too small to know yet – _why do you keep painting? Why do you talk to her? Why are you always here for me?_

 

When Clara looked up at Mr Smith again, he was smiling. 

 

‘Clara love,’ he whispered, and his voice was withered with all his years. One hand reached down to cup her face in his gnarling, blue-stained palm. ‘She’s here. She's always here to me.’ His other hand tapped gently at Clara’s heart. ‘And here. Yours to keep now, mind and heart. I keep River. You keep your mum. And you’ll never lose her. She loves you too.’

 

Something within Clara, something soft as a heart and fragile as a childhood, splintered and cracked.

 

‘No, she doesn’t. She can’t anymore. She’s dead. She’s over.’

 

Clara could have been sobbing, but she wouldn’t have known. She felt herself tumbling down, tumbling inwards. The earth tipped and fell and wouldn’t hold her any longer.

 

Then Mr Smith’s old arms went around her, and something held her home.

 

‘Oh, my Clara,’ he told her, quiet as the wind whistling over the edge of the world. ‘Not everything ends. Not love. Death couldn’t take that. It was already yours to keep.’

 

She could feel his heartbeat through the tweed and blue, feel it against her brow. Her own stuttered brokenly against his fingertips. But it was there, and so was his. Love kept them steady, and she was alive.

 

**Author's Note:**

> Warnings for the illness and death of a parent (neither are witnessed), references to the loss of a family in a war, and descriptions of the forgetfulness and loneliness that come with age and loss. 
> 
> This is a fic that I've been working with for a long time. I adore the relationship between Eleven and Clara, the love they have for each other, as well as the closeness of Clara's relationship with her parents. And in particular, this fic is dedicated to a friend who lost a parent to cancer recently, and to my dad, a doctor, who loved that man and who lost his own father to the same illness when he was barely older than Clara. I don't presume to have any idea what it's like to lose a parent, but if there's anything I want to give my dad or my friend, it's the same truth that Clara and the Doctor find, here and in the show: love is never lost. It never ends.


End file.
